yelvington.com

In 1999 I declared that journalists must accept a new social role as guides, not gatekeepers. Today's New York Times has an excellent example of that principle in action, eviscerating the wingnut political online magazine Insight for publishing a stream of falsehoods.

The news peg is an "article on the Insight Web site asserting that the presidential campaign of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton was preparing an accusation that her rival, Senator Barack Obama, had covered up a brief period he had spent in an Islamic religious school in Indonesia when he was 6." The claim was bogus, but nevertheless set off a stream of chatter among right-wing pseudo-journalists that quickly spread the falsehood.

Amusing, this graf:

"And in an interview, John Moody, a senior vice president at Fox News, said its commentators had erred by citing the Clinton-Obama report. “The hosts violated one of our general rules, which is know what you are talking about,” Mr. Moody said. “They reported information from a publication whose accuracy we didn’t know.”"

Pointing out info-falsehood and exposing political smear campaigns is, unfortunately, a growth industry.

When I did a search for Insight, Google identified it as being affiliated with the Washington Times, a connection that newspaper now disavows. However, both Insight and the Washington Times are funded by Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church and its right-wing Korean political affiliates.

A few weeks ago the word was that the Los Angeles Times' "Manhattan project" (renamed "Spring Street") report had disappeared into the bureaucracy, never to be seen again. But it resurfaced today full of fury in a major shakeup outlined by Staci Kramer at paidContent.org. This is a big deal, and is especially remarkable considering the conditions under which it's happening. Ordinarily, when a company is on the auction block, paralysis ensues -- not radical change.

I've written about the Los Angeles Times previously. It is the poster child for the endangered metro newspaper, and it's significant that Rob Barrett, who "wanted to go hyperlocal," has come out on top. Our Bluffton Today was one of the case studies examined by Times reporters in their research. Can the Times be a newspaper of national stature and a family of hyperlocal, personally relevant products? This is going to be interesting.

When I read the Gannett "Information Center" memo and its attached Q and A, I immediately worried that there was so much in it that it would be misinterpreted and lead to unpredictable side effects. Faced with the enormity of it all, people would naturally latch onto the little parts that felt most comfortable (like hard news 24x7, or video).

I don't know whether that's the problem or if it's just a good old fashioned case of playing telephone, but it does seem that what's coming out at the bottom of the funnel is not always what was poured in the top, judging from the whinefest at SportsShooter.com.

I don't recall the memo dictating that everyone would be a generalist and no one a specialist, or that photographers would quit shooting and spend all their time editing "citizen journalism" video uploads, et cetera.

Introducing change at any organization is difficult. Gannett happens to be a top-down, central-control operation, and a top-down, central-control change memo comes naturally. Following it up is another thing entirely, and it looks like that will be a process full of bumps and surprises.

I don't happen to work for such a company (we are, by comparison, decentralized), but in conversations over the last week I was surprised to hear from several editors and publishers that a "call to action" memo would be welcomed.

There is no substitute for leadership at the top. But there's also no substitute for leadership at the other layers, too. Including among photographers.

Howard Owens has some thoughts about all this on his weblog.

Some of the coverage of Friday's announcement from Gannett that things will be different misses the most important points. This is not about putting breaking news online all day long, which -- as I observed the other day -- is hardly a new idea. Nor is it about equipping reporters with video cameras.

Wired's Jeff Howe nails it on his blog item, which focuses on "7 primary job areas" that are fairly buried in the Dubow memo.

It's role shift time. This is about engagement, convening community, utility, and thinking big about small. The "what" and not just the "when" and "how."

Looking over the agenda for the 13th World Editors Forum, which will be held this summer in Moscow, Jeff Jarvis reacts: "I smell fear." Well, I do too. Not everywhere, but in many newsrooms there's a real fear of citizen journalism, ranging from a concern that it will somehow undermine quality and credibility to a paycheck-centered fear that publishers are conspiring to lay off reporters in favor of unpaid citizen labor.

But I will be there telling a tale of hope, not of fear. Opening the process of journalism so that it's participatory, so that we listen more effectively, so that no one is disempowered, so that we genuinely reflect a community in conversation with itself leads to better journalism, higher readership of professionally produced content, and a bond with the community that newspapers have not enjoyed for more than a quarter century.

Earlier this week I was in Orlando at the multifaceted NAA Marketing Conference, which included Connections, the new-media conference. I got a kick out of Clyde Bentley of the University of Missouri -- a temple of big-J journalism if ever there was one -- declaring that editors are poor judges of what's important to real people. How did Clyde discover this? Through the myMissourian.com project, which asked members of the community to write for a weekly TMC product. The information priorities of consumers are sometimes the inverse of the information priorities of editors.

So, who's right? Consumers or editors? I think that if journalists are that far out of phase with the public, a realignment is in order. But it's not going to happen unless professional journalists are willing to open the windows and let in a little fresh air. Be not afraid. It's an opportunity to do better work.